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Re: [xml-dev] Are namespaces actually crypto-entities orcrypto-links? (was re: [xml-dev] Napkin grammar)

The link above to the James Clark blog is very interesting because a lot of people summarize what problems (and strengths) t
hey see in XML Namespaces.

My proclivity to "minimal maximalism" (i.e. get rid of things that are impossible but try to keep in support in some form what you can)
makes me think that supporting namespaces in some form is just as important pragmatically as defining XML in terms of SGML was,
25 years ago: there is an ecosystem that supports two-part names, and it is an own-goal to be unnecessarily compatible with
other, entrenched technologies.

Which reduces the question to just: how much of XML Namespaces can we keep without compromising goals, e.g. performance
goals? What syntax does it require?  Is it actually just an example of something else, so that if we go to the trouble of supporting
namespaces we can generalize it a little at only trivial implementation consequence?

Hence the interest above in knowing whether Namespaces could be subsumed by an entity-like mechanism or expanded into
a link-like mechanism.

Cheers
Rick



On Sat, Jul 24, 2021 at 10:34 AM Arjun Ray <arayq2@gmail.com> wrote:
 On Fri, 23 Jul 2021 13:21:59 +0200, Marcus Reichardt
<u123724@gmail.com> wrote:

| (<https://blog.jclark.com/2010/01/xml-namespaces.html>)

+1.

| My opinion is that namespaces were probably born out of the
| expectation that a wealth of new vocabularies would be designed for
| the Web, and hence a principled mechanism was thought needed for
| avoiding name collisions.

That was part of the post-facto "justifications".  The initial impetus
was the invention of "qualified names" in RDF-XML (a markup mishmash
from happy-go-taggy weekenders).  This required an imprimatur, since
it was part of the W3C Metadata Activity, which at that time Could Do
No Wrong and Could Not Be Gainsaid.  Qnames were a done deal,
essentially by fiat, and it was up to the XML Working Group to cook up
a suitable spec.

The business about name collisions was a remarkable episode in mass
delusion.  The means to avoid collisions were already known from the
ENR TC and the Hytime standard: they just weren't well-known, and once
everyone who mattered was pre-sold on Qnames as the greatest thing
since sliced bread, they remained not well-known for good.

[For completeness, here is an incomplete essay from long ago on how it
works: http://users.nyct.net/~aray/ns/ns.html.  And for how the ideas
fared on this mailing list, see
http://lists.xml.org/archives/xml-dev/200305/threads.html#00787. ]

| it seems namespaces are on its way out, at least on the Web.

On Stack Overflow, I saw a comment remarking that "XML Namespaces are
cargo-cult programming at its finest."  Very succinctly put.

| So why not drop namespaces alltogether or at least have
| their definition not spill into parser layering with unwarranted
| complexity such as nesting and redefinitions etc eg. follow the
| approach of ISO-19757 (DSDL-9) and use eg.
|
|     <?DSDL-9 bind-ns-to-prefix ns-iri="..." prefix="..."?>

I still think losing the atomic nature of basic tokens like names of
elements and attributes was a mistake.  But, as James wrote, what's
done is done.  The best we can do now is to ease the transition of
namespaces into obsolescence and eventual oblivion.

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